The World’s Toughest Mudder is a 24 hour competition that has a track with many obstacles on it. It’s a competition with the person who completes the most miles in three categories earn many thousands of dollars in prize money. If you watch videos a common theme is dealing with the pain. Physically your body will eventually give out, but often the mental side hurts more.
Everyone has a threshold for when your mind acknowledges the pain that your body feels.
For me, I thought I had no tolerance for pain. When things hurt it brought me to my knees or just stared crying. What I have learned is that I really have a high pain tolerance.
It works this way.
If the level of pain is not above a line say here ——————–Â
Than my mind does not acknowledge it. Anything on this page below that line simply would not register in my mind as pain.
The thing is, I can still be in pain without it registering.
Needs Thresholds
We all have needs. The simplest are food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and then later on things like to know and be known, love and be loved, serve and be served.
If you are more introverted you have a threshold for needing alone time & deep connection with specific people. Extroverts – stimulus in the form of other people.
The thing is that as something builds to be a need that’s above your threshold … it’s still a need. Just as I feel pain long before it reaches a threshold in my mind that causes me to go into a fetal position.
Reaching a Threshold
There are two ways you can build to and bust through a threshold:
1. a single event
2. compounding events
An introvert at a big party & is around lots of different people can cause the need for solitude to spike. News of someone in an accident can cause a need for connection. An all nighter, no matter if it’s due to a sick child or pushing on a deadline, can cause a need for sleep. Compounding events are much more complex and often work in other ways. You can skip a meal at most times, but if you skip enough then you have reached a threshold and eating goes from non-urgent to urgent.
That’s what Stephen Covey is talking about in First Things First. The difference between an important & urgent task vs an important & non-urgent task is generally the amount of time you have put it off.
If you are on a 24 hour race, resting & fueling your body is non-urgent until you cross a threshold.
The winners, they are the people who don’t wait until a need hits urgent, but takes care of those needs while they are still under the threshold.
One of the hard parts is when we choose to not acknowledge that we have these needs at all.
What are real needs that you often ignore before they reach your threshold?
